Yet another industrial giant has decided to join the growing number of companies to create a smoke-free working environment. On Wednesday, SK Group, a local energy and telecom giant, said it informed workers that it is to completely ban smoking from its headquarters starting next week. The ban will be effective from Monday in all 35 stories of the SK building in downtown Seoul, which serves as ...

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan (AP) ― When a woman involved in a polio vaccine drive turned up at Osama bin Laden’s hideaway, she remarked to the men behind the high walls about the expensive SUVs parked inside. The men took the vaccine, apparently to administer to the 23 children at the compound, and told her to go away. The terror chief and his family kept well hidden behind thick walls in this northwes...

Hikers are being asked to raise funds for children in the Himalayas by taking to the Korean mountains. A charity hike is to be held to raise money for MountainChild’s ranch program in Kathmandu, Nepal. The charity helps tackle a variety of issues facing children living in the Himalayan mountains, including rescuing them from the threat of human trafficking. The MountainChild Get-High campaign i...

One of the most important tasks for a diplomat is to settle disputes and resolve conflicts through negotiations. But what if he himself should cause a dispute or a conflict, as a former ambassador to an African country may have done? The case in point involved the ambassador who recently returned home after his assignment in the Ivory Coast. Among the items he brought with him from the African c...

The nation’s holdings of foreign currency surpassed the $300 billion mark at the end of April. Should the nation confront any financial crisis in the future, these bulging state coffers will be of great help in cushioning the blow. To hold $300 billion in foreign reserves is nothing short of a sea change for a nation that has been exposed to the threat of sovereign bankruptcy on two occasions du...

You’ve no doubt been hearing the harrowing warnings about what might happen if Congress refuses to lift the federal government’s debt ceiling, as some conservative Republicans have threatened. If the federal government gets anywhere near defaulting on its debts, President Obama warned this month, that “could plunge the world economy back into recession.” Even House Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Oh...

When President Obama visited El Salvador in March, he offered an acute analysis of the danger represented by homegrown criminal gangs and international narcotics cartels. This is a shared problem with a shared responsibility, the president declared. Nice speech, but where’s the beef? The unrestricted flow of drugs into the United States via Central America ― or Mexico, or the Caribbean ― represe...